Operating Systems

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD remains an interesting port of Debian that pairs its GNU user-land with the FreeBSD kernel. With the Debian testing code for Testing / Jessie 8.0 is the new FreeBSD 10.0 kernel. The benchmarks today at Phoronix are comparing Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to Debian GNU/Linux using the latest 7.5 Wheezy release along with the latest testing code.

With it having been since late last year when trying out the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD variant that pairs Debian's GNU user-land with the FreeBSD kernel in place of Linux, I ran some fresh trials on one of our test-beds this week.

A few days ago my benchmarking revealed Windows 8.1 is outperforming Ubuntu Linux with the latest Intel open-source graphics drivers on Haswell hardware. I have since conducted tests on the Celeron N2820 NUC, and sadly, the better OpenGL performance is found with Microsoft's operating system.

One month ago we looked at the latest performance of Fedora 20, but with its more liberal update strategy -- especially with the long release time until Fedora 21 -- we're back with some more tests today as since last month the Linux 3.14 kernel has been added and other changes. This article has benchmarks of the Fedora 20 KDE spin out-of-the-box and then with all available updates as of this week to see how the performance has evolved in the half-year since the F20 release.

With the imminent release of Linux Mint 17 "Qiana", here are some new benchmarks of the Linux Mint 17 release candidate compared to the past four stable releases of the Ubuntu-based distribution: Linux Mint 16, Linux Mint 15, Linux Mint 14, and Linux Mint 13 while all are running the Cinnamon Desktop Environment.

At the request of many Phoronix readers here are the updated benchmarks comparing the performance of several NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards under Ubuntu 14.04 Linux to Windows 8.1 with all of the latest updates for each operating system. While the NVIDIA graphics driver code-base is largely shared between platforms, many Linux gamers will be pleased to note that the Linux performance has begun advancing beyond the frame-rates offered under Microsoft Windows.

It's been a while since last comparing the performance of the Windows and Linux Intel Haswell OpenGL graphics drivers. Last year when we looked at the Intel "Haswell" HD Graphics 4600 performance the driver speeds under Ubuntu Linux and Windows 8.1 were almost neck-and-neck, but since then it seems the rate of performance optimizations and improvements within the Intel Windows driver has outpaced the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver.

For those curious about the performance advantages of using 64-bit Ubuntu Linux over 32-bit Ubuntu on a modern Intel laptop, here are 32-bit vs. 64-bit benchmarks of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the ASUS Zenbook Prime.